What do things look like on the outside? That’s the main focus we have as human beings. But beauty is only skin deep. As with relationships and leaked NSA documents, we quickly discover that what’s on the inside is just as, if not more, important….
Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
A Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attack gives an attacker the ability to use your web application to send requests to other applications running on the same machine, or to other servers which can be on the same or on a remote network. Since the…
Automatic detection of XXE vulnerabilities in OpenID implementations using Acunetix AcuMonitor
Reginaldo Silva recently uncovered a very interesting bug affecting Facebook (and received $33,500 for this discovery). The bug is caused by improper handling of XML documents in OpenID implementations causing XML External Entity Expansion vulnerabilities. He mentioned in his article that many OpenID implementations/libraries are…
New Security Checks Added to Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner
The latest build of Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner includes a lot of changes and new security tests. Here is a short summary of the most interesting tests we’ve just added. 1. Vulnerable JavaScript libraries Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner can now identify vulnerable versions of various JavaScript…
Understanding the value of the OWASP Top 10 2013
Find out how IT security professionals can benefit from the free resources available from the OWASP Top 10 2013 List of Risks. As IT security professionals we certainly have our fair share of information available to simplify the work we do. There’s the CVE dictionary,…
OWASP Updated the Top 10 List of Risks for 2013
Last week, the OWASP team officially updated the Top 10 list of risks so as to make it relevant for the web attack vectors identified in the last three years. The OWASP Top Ten summarizes and often combines web application vulnerabilities into an easy to interpret and…
WordPress Caching Plugins Remote PHP Code Execution
Two very popular WordPress caching plugins: WP Super Cache (4,373,811 downloads) and W3 Total Cache (1,975,480 downloads) have been affected by a vulnerability that allows remote users to execute arbitrary PHP code. The affected versions are: WP Super Cache (version 1.2 and below, version 1.3.x and up are…
WordPress Attack Vectors and Open Amazon S3 Buckets Identified by Acunetix WVS
Recently there were a lot of news reports about an ongoing attack on sites using WordPress software. Attackers are using around 90,000 computers to try to brute force WordPress credentials. All these servers are trying common account names like admin, administrator, test, tom, jessica, … and…
The Risks Associated with Third-Party Software Components
I was recently contacted by a colleague in an information security leadership position who was concerned about his developers using some third-party plug-ins for an enterprise application they were rolling out. His developers wanted to install these third-party components in order to speed up their…